PAST PERFORMANCE IS NO GUARANTEE OF FUTURE RESULTS: Matt Yglesias on ‘Elite Misinformation.’
The last section of his piece has a subhead that reads “Lying to people is bad.”* I agree but I think at this point Yglesias underestimates what capable liars some people are. He writes, “the political system is too large…to operate on a conspiratorial basis.” Maybe that’s true on a longer time scale but I’ve personally seen the left try to operate on a conspiratorial basis too many times to shrug off the possibility that it can work sometimes.
I won’t rehash the old days at great length but Democrats did their very best to trick Americans into accepting a version of Obamacare that was intended to lead inevitably to a single-payer program that progressives really wanted. Within their own ranks they were explicit that this was their goal, but to Americans in general they just lied. There was a genuine conspiracy to mislead people. Instead of telling the truth they went with “if you like your plan, you can keep it.”
And frankly, you could look at the more recent claims about Donald Trump and Russia. The Steele Dossier was given credibility by a lot of reporters who later walked away from it when it became clear it was mostly a dumpster fire of misinformation funded by the Hillary campaign as an October surprise. But for at least two years a lot of people were leaning hard on it.
* Like I said, past performance is definitely no guarantee of future results: Liberal blogger Matt Yglesias advocates lying on Twitter.
But what set off a flurry of Tweets today – and Yglesias’s advocacy of lying – was a charge by Yglesias via Twitter that Washington Times reporter Eli Lake has a “deserved reputation for dishonesty.” Hemingway, Lake and others confronted Yglesias on Twitter about the charge, pointing out that Yglesias himself had actually advocated dishonesty.
Then, Yglesias dug in, saying lying was a necessary part of politics.
Yglesias’s Twitter opponents also charged he does not take criticism well.
“When [Yglesias] gets frustrated because he can’t counter an argument, he calls people ‘dishonest’,” Lake said, also calling him “a child.”
In concluding his interview with The Daily Caller, Yglesias said “go f**k yourself” and hung up the phone.
Good times, good times:
